Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (17 page)

On another hopeful casting excursion, Eric Clapton was the catalyst for a thunderous, life-altering event. He suggested Cynthia ply her craft on his band's opening act. "That was pretty unbelievable! We found Cream's hotel and went up to Eric Clapton's room. Dianne and I just chatted with him-he was nice as pie. We asked if he was interested in being casted and he said, `I might be, but I have a friend who may even be more interested-Frank Zappa.' Deep down I'm thinking, `Ooh, isn't that guy a big drug addict?' But Eric took us to meet him and he wasn't scary, not scary and loud the way I thought he'd be. He was intelligent, respectful, and very curious, and he seemed interested in my idea about having a rock-cock museum."

A couple months later, the Mothers of Invention were headlining the Kinetic Playground, and the owner, who had previously ignored Cynthia's shenanigans, breathlessly told her that Frank Zappa was looking for her. "I said, `You're kidding. Does that mean we get in free?" Frank had been pondering her handiwork and was full of grandiose ideas. "`I want to help you further your dream of collecting more casts for the museum of rock-cocks you told me about,' he said. `I want to bring you out to Los Angeles and pay you a stipend to create more cock.' For a girl like me, that was unheard of. I mean, I was a keypuncher! I had just escaped from the Warden and didn't have much hope for a future-I wasn't raised to think about what I wanted to do in life because my mother told me what I'd be doing: taking care of her."

The GTO's were in the throes of recording our album, and before she made the move to the West Coast, Cynthia was featured on side B, track 7, called "Miss Pamela's First Conversation with the Plaster Casters of Chicago."

Our high-pitched voices joyously trilled and burbled over each other when we realized we had the same drooly crush on Noel Redding. Because of this and other breathy discoveries, we knew we were rock sisters forever and couldn't wait to kiss and squeeze each other. I hurriedly made plans to spend a wintry week with my newfound friend in Chicago.

It was love at first gaze. I soon realized that Cynthia was surprisingly shy and tender hearted, and the pounds she had added to her slender frame exacerbated her already low self-image. I told her how beautiful she was. We divulged our deepest secrets, played loads of records, and the days flew by, even though I had all the wrong clothes for the subzero, snowy weather. I remember my lips and toes were numb as I staggered through the slush in vintage chiffon and spike heels to see Fleetwood Mac on New Year's Eve. We dribbled over Peter Green and marveled joyously at Mick Fleetwood's testicles that seemed to be hanging out of his trousers while he bashed the drums. Later we were told he wore a pair of red wooden balls on his belt for good luck, but we didn't believe it for a minute. We lounged around for hours, gushing over Noel Redding and various other rail-thin rockers. On the wall next to the canopied bed, Cynthia had tacked up a poster of the dangerous new British quartet, Led Zeppelin. "Just my type!" I crooned, but Cynthia warned that they already had a severely roguish reputation. She should have paid attention to her own stellar advice, because shortly after I left, she cast their scandalous road manager, Richard Cole, and had an encounter that left her sadly dazed and confused. "I'm saving that big, juicy story for my own book. There was a routine involving Robert Plant, John Bonham, and Richard Cole. Robert was the bait, and Bonham and Cole were the violent ones. Jimmy was always off with a girl, and John Paul was horrified by it." Let's just say that Zeppelin lived up (or down) to their bad reputation.

"I felt like shit. It made me wary-it didn't make me want to stop being a groupie or Plaster Caster, it just made me realize I couldn't go into any band's hotel room without researching them first. To this day, I tell young girls to find out whatever they can about a band before going into their hotel room."

Eric Burdon and the Animals were faves, but when it came time to work, Cynthia became flummoxed due to another giant crush. "I tried to cast Eric, but it was a mold failure-and he wouldn't let me do it again. I was distracted by the guitarist, John Weider. He was helping me mix the mold and that made me fuck it up. I was turned on by him, but of course I was too fat."

Right around this difficult time, Dianne fell in love with a drag queen and retired her plating crown. Used and abused by Zeppelin and minus her beloved partner, Cynthia's artistic vision never wavered. "First I did it to meet the bands, secondly it satisfied my collector's impulse-I used to collect stamps before that. It was Frank Zappa who told me it was an art form. I said, `You are telling me it's an art form, so it must be an art form.'"

Frank's earnest heart was in the right place, but when he imported her to town, Cynthia and La-La Land didn't exactly merge. "I hated L.A. The first week I did not like the people I met, they didn't seem to like me. Put it this way: I didn't laugh for ten days, until I met Alice Cooper-he had Midwestern humor like mine."

As she tried to adjust to the frantic Hollywood pace, Cynthia thankfully found a new plater called Harlow. This capricious original already had a scintillating past as a member of the gender-bending Cockettes, and together she and Cynthia immortalized a few rock boys. "I casted somebody from a band called the Churls; I casted the drummer Keith Webb from the Terry Reid Band; Eddie Brigati, the singer in the Young Rascals; and Aynsley Dunbar from the Mothers. And Zal Yanovsky from the Lovin' Spoonful. That one turned out good and it was a good experience."

Because of her teenage addiction to musical theatre, Cynthia pursued playwright/actor/singer Anthony Newley and enlisted my pal Iva Turner as plater. "Cynthia was one of the few people I knew who loved Anthony Newley as much as I did," Iva tells me. "In fact, we shared the fantasy that he might want to be carted some day, and made a pact that I would be his plater. So, when she called and excitedly gasped, `Guess who's coming over!' I guessed it on the first try and rushed to her apartment. Mr. Newley arrived a few minutes later. He was adorable, sexy, and enthusiastic about being inducted into the Plaster Caster Hall of Fame. After a bit of preliminary chitchat around the dining room table, Cynthia went into the kitchen and began scooping alginates, while I coaxed our honoree into the bedroom. As I lovingly labored to bring Mr. Newley's cock to its full potential, I could hear Cynthia counting down the seconds, `Ten, nine, eight. . .' and when she got to one, the door seemed to blast open, Mr. Newley jumped to his feet, Ms. Plaster Caster held the container to his crotch, and together they shoved his hard cock into the mixture. `It's cold!' he declared. (Don't worry. I warmed him up later.) Cynthia was the consummate professional. Gently removing his pubic hairs from the mold, she congratulated him on a job well done. She could tell immediately that the cast was going to be a good one, and if you look at Mr. Newley's cast, you'll see that she was absolutely right. It's a beautiful example of her signature amalgamation of sex and art."

While Cynthia mixed plaster, and the GTO's continued romping around Hollywood, Mr. Zappa attempted another brave undertaking. He wanted to capture the groupie spirit by publishing Cynthia's diaries, along with mine. He even asked Noel Redding, who kept copious road notes, if he'd like to round out the proceedings. Cynthia and I spent long days reading our diaries aloud while Frank's proper secretary, the veddy British Pauline, typed up the frisky endearments for future generations. Sadly, even the possibility of her own fame couldn't keep Cynthia in Tinsel Town.

Her Hollywood apartment was robbed, and Frank's shyster manager, Herb Cohen, offered to put her all-important casts into his vault for "safekeeping." "I was passive and easily intimidated, I didn't want to argue: Frank trusted him and I trusted him, so I agreed." As if being burglarized wasn't bad enough, she got hit by a car and was badly hurt crossing the street on the Sunset Strip. At that point, even Mr. Zappa's enthusiasm wasn't enough to hold her here. Cynthia wanted to go home. "Times were changing: for one thing, when in Chicago, bands wanted to be casted, but in L.A., they only wanted to date beautiful models. And the sexual revolution was changing in 1971; people were starting to get married instead of sleeping with strangers. It was no longer trendy to be in my collection, I guess, so I didn't capture people of the magnitude of Jimi Hendrix. Suddenly, everything was going wrong; it was a really bogus time for me."

Back in Chicago, Cynthia settled into a normal typesetting job and didn't whip up any alginates for ten long years. "I didn't care for the '70s music. The rock was getting too hard for me, and I worked a straight job. Plaster casting does not lend itself to the time I had to go to bed. Usually the golden hour for a dick to go in my mold was 3:00 A.M., and I had to get up for work three hours later." In the early '80s, Cynthia came out of semiretirement. "Punk rock started up and that's when the music got really exciting for me again."

Due to the gathering obsession and keen yearning for the days of Hendrix, the Doors, and Zeppelin, the more mythological the '60s heyday became, and the more Cynthia found she was garnering a new kind of respect. And she was once again svelte and miniskirted. "It was different, yeah. I was no longer fat, I got more respect, people wanted to be on the same mantel with Jimi Hendrix. It started building over the space of fifteen or twenty years-and to this day, the pace is still mounting."

In 1986, my first book, I'm with the Band, became a bestseller, and Cynthia and I were happily reunited on the first salacious groupie expose on MTV. "Even before I moved to L.A., the media jumped on the Plaster Casters, and I didn't expect that. Slowly even more media became interested and started to call me an icon. I try not to think about it too much or it makes me crazy." Cynthia smiles. "But it does come in handy when things are down. The fan mail keeps me goin'-it really helps."

The icon continued pursuing musicians that moved her, and in the '80s and early '90s she generated a plethora of artistic achievements, among them Jon Langford of the Mekons, Chris Connelly of the Revolting Cocks, the Dead Kennedy's Jello Biafra, and Richard Lloyd, the guitarist for Television.

Encouraged by the burgeoning fascination with her "sweet babies," Cynthia politely asked Herb Cohen to return her casts. His response left her stupefied. "In the late '80s it became apparent that I should get them back because interest was building. I said, `I'd like 'em back, please,' and Herb said, `No, I own them.' I thought, `I can't afford to get them back. Holy fucking shit: now what?' At various points of my life I felt like a loser. I could never win; people took advantage of my passive nature. And this Herb Cohen trial was a turning point in my life. I didn't think it was humanly possible, but I actually found lawyers to represent me for nothing because they loved the idea of the case. My attorney thought what had happened to me was horrible."

It took five years for the Case of the Stolen Plaster Casts to come to trial at a Los Angeles County courthouse, and Cynthia made the front page of the Calendar section of the L.A. Times. "Exhibits A through Z were the casts. I know the paparazzi were there to shoot them. I had to testify about dicks on the stand for two days, and you, my doll, were my only witness." Yes, I was a character witness for a true character, and even in the face of attempted character assassination, I was confident that the precious truth would prevail. A puny, fresh-faced bumpkin attorney brandished one of my bygone "love letters" to Cynthia as proof that we had been lesbian lovers, insisting that my testimony would therefore be tainted. With C-minus dramatics, he scornfully recited my flower-child prose.

"February 10, 1969: My true love, my dear pinata face, how I love you and long to see you. Please come here to work. I loved your letter, my sweet. Write sooner than soon as I will have my heart tied to the mailbox. If each long mile between us were just a single kiss, I'd buy a mileage ticket, and not a mile I'd miss .. The judge wasn't going for it. At the end of the four-day spectacle in which the bronzed penises in question stood proudly in the hallowed halls of American justice, Cynthia was awarded her casts, and Herb had to fork over $10,000 for the pleasure of returning them to their rightful owner.

Cynthia became an equal opportunity plaster caster a few years back when she started casting rocker girl's mammary glands. "I was liking as many girl bands as boy bands, and girls were not just great singers, but instrumentalists and songwriters, so it was long overdue. The first girl I casted was my friend Suzy Beal from L7, and it worked like a charm. I've casted both sisters in the Demolition Doll Rods, the only band I have a complete set of: Danny's dick, and Christine Doll Rod and Margaret Doll Rod's tits. I've got Laetitia from Stereolab, Sally of the Mekons, Karen of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs." Cynthia and I have been talking about casting each other's titties sometime in the future, a thrilling possibility.

Cynthia's untamed life in art was captured in 2003 when the documentary DVD Plaster Caster: The Rock and Roll Adventures of Super-Groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster was released by Fragment Films. I was interviewed and so was our long-ago faverave Noel Redding, who passed away soon after filming. "Before the shoot, he called me long-distance," she says, still impressed by all those miles between Cork County, Ireland, and Chicago, Illinois. "God, I'm proud and honored and really sad, too, that his last appearance on film was in my cockumentary."